In Foundlings Christopher Nealon analyses texts produced by American gay men and lesbians in the first half of the twentieth century - poems by Hart Crane, novels by Willa Cather, gay male physique magazines, and lesbian pulp fiction - to argue that, during this period, queer writers and artists were working their way toward a notion of homosexuality defined by a particular foundling relationship to the idea of history. Drawing a vivid picture of the longing for connection found in these texts, Nealon points to the particularly unfinished nature of lesbian and gay history.
Nealon locates in these diverse works a coming-of-age narrative driven by the figure of the foundling - a representative of queer disaffiliation from family, nation, and history itself. The young runaways in Cather's novels, the way critics conflated Crane's homosexual body with his verse, the suggestive poses and utopic captions of muscle magazines, and the ageing butch heroine from Bannon's pulp novels all embody for Nealon the uncertain space between two poles of homosexual self-consciousness. The "inversion" model that was dominant in the first half of the century, he explains, held that homosexuals are souls of one gender trapped in the body of another, while the more contemporary "ethnic" model refers to the existence of a distinct and collective culture among gays and lesbians. Nealon's unique readings, however, reveal a locked tension between these two philosophical poles, and not, as is widely theorised, a linear progress from one to the other.
This startlingly original study will interest those working on gay and lesbian studies, American literature and culture, and twentieth century history.